


Labs 19, 20 and 21

by Lost_Elf



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22878271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lost_Elf/pseuds/Lost_Elf
Summary: Rhys died in an accident at R&D. But what is Handsome Jack if not determined to bring him back?
Relationships: Handsome Jack & Rhys (Borderlands)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Labs 19, 20 and 21

“Jack, you have a meeting at the R&D in fifteen minutes.”

Rhys is standing right there, in front of his table. There is a stack of papers in his hand, a usual sight on a workday. He is wearing his favourite outfit, too. The black set Jack bought him.

“I…” Jack finds his voice too weak to breach the suffocating silence. There is a small smile on Rhys’ lips, something that rarely went away when they worked together. “I don’t want to go to that meeting,” he says, finally.

“Why not? You love R&D! Come on, Jack. It will only be twenty minutes. Then you can have a nap.”

Rhys winked at him, and the whole world spun for a minute as the air was sucked from Jack’s lungs. His heart and head ached, but he forced himself to remain calm. “Okay. I’ll go, and you can stay here and… have a little break. Or go over some reports. I’ll be back soon.”

The CEO stood up, but Rhys’ unimpressed gaze rooted him to place. “Jack, I’m not letting you sneak out of the meeting. I’m going with you to make sure you arrive. Come on, what’s the problem? You love R&D!”

“And you hate it!” he argued, his voice hoarse, not angry. “You don’t have to go. I promise I’ll go there.”

“Handsome Jack doesn’t do silly promises,” the PA smirks.

“I do,” Jack says lightly. “I’ll go there, and you stay here, alright?”

“What’s wrong about this meeting? You never made a fuss about R&D! Is this gonna be a regular thing?” A roll of mismatched eyes accompanies it, and it’s another deep slash in the CEO’s chest. So familiar, yet it feels like he hadn’t seen that gesture in ages.

“I don’t want to go,” he whispers. “You will… You will die there today.”

“Don’t be silly, Jack. I won’t die,” Rhys laughs.

“Please, don’t come.”

“We are both going,” Rhys stays firm. So, Jack changes tactics. It’s just past 2 PM, so maybe…

“Let’s have a little fun, first. Let me take you out for lunch. They won’t mind if we arrive late.”

Rhys is, once more, unimpressed. “I already had lunch, Jack.”

“Then ice-cream!” He sounds downright desperate, now. His voice is shaking, body too. He’s pleading. “You love ice-cream. Let me treat you to the biggest bucket of ice cream your favourite place makes. You know, for being a good PA and following me to R&D even though you hate it.”

For the first time, Rhys contemplates Jack’s offers. But then he shakes his head. “We can get ice-cream on the way back. Let’s go, or we’ll be late.”

“I want ice-cream first,” Jack says weakly, but he follows his PA out of the office like a lost puppy. “Please, Rhysie.”

“We’ll get it when we get back, Jack,” Rhys sighs. “Come one, it’s just twenty minutes full of cool stuff. You’ll like it.”

“Promise, Rhys?” he asks. “Promise we’ll get back and have ice-cream?”

“Of course, you big baby,” the PA laughs and activates the fast travel.

Jack wants to try more. He wans to lock Rhys in a cabinet on their way, or in some cage, or reactivate the fast travel and send him away, but when they materialise, they are already in that lab. A scientist has stopped boasting about his advancement in cloning, and he is about to reveal the result.

“Get down, Rhys!” Jack screams, but nobody seems to hear him anymore. He runs to the PA, tries to tackle him to the floor, but he flies straight through his body. From his helpless position on the ground he watches a light beam hit Rhys in the chest and continue through him.

“Jack!” he gasps, face scrunched up in shock and pain. When his body falls to the floor, a big wound in the middle of his chest, he is already dead.

Jack wakes up with a cry. He thrashes around for a while, fighting the sheets wrapped too tight around him. For a second, his hand hits something warm on the other half of the bed, and his heart jumps, head telling him that it was just a bad dream.

But when he finally sits up and turns on the light, he only finds a pillow next to him. The other part of the bed hasn’t been used in thirty-eight days.

Immediately, Jack turns the light off. He wills all of the world away, tries to forget. He tells himself that Rhys is sleeping at Vaughn’s, and he will see him in the morning. Hugging a pillow, he keeps telling himself lies until he falls asleep.

He doesn’t have normal dreams anymore. Every single one he has is a different version of the same event. He never manages to stop it. Not even when he runs a bullet through his own head. Every night, he watches his boyfriend die multiple times.

In the morning, Jack isn’t really rested. He looks like shit and has to spend twenty minutes in the bathroom just making himself presentable. Sweets are the only food appealing and motivating enough to force it down, and so the CEO eats a box of doughnuts for breakfast.

Every day flies by without Jack noticing details. He visits meetings, spreads fear in his employees, airlocks anyone who angers him, or brings up his mood or the numbers of airlocked employees in the past month.

In the evening, he finishes job at 7 exactly. Not a minute later. Rhys would be proud. He didn’t like when Jack stayed up late, but now he hadn’t done that in twenty-nine days.

Instead of going to the penthouse, he goes to the R&D. The dead corpse of Naka-blah-blah is still hanging in the middle of the main corridor, filling it with the smell of rotting flesh. He walks skilfully around the puddle of goo that leaks out of it.

The lab he heads to is restricted access. Jack and few others can access it, and he is the only one who can actually leave it. The scientists will only be released through airlock or once they finish their job.

The men and women look tired, but other than lack of sleep, they live a nice life. They get good meals here, anything they could wish for as long as they do their job. There is a jacuzzi bath in one of the bathrooms, but the guy who wished for it is orbiting Pandora right now, shot outta moonshot in a faulty container. His colleagues still like using the bath after a long night of work, though.

Every evening, Jack comes here, asks about the progress. Today, he is told that the last body they produced died because its heart was faulty, but they think they should actually have a working body in five days tops. Normally, Jack would tell the scientists that he expects to have it in three. That’s how he rules the company. But what is a body without the spirit?

“Good job, keep it up,” he mumbles mindlessly and proceeds to leave, entering the other secret lab. The situation here is identical, except they aren’t working on cloning a body. Naka-chump had a lot of notes and data on not only that, but also on creating an AI based on a person’s mind. It should have made Jack immortal, but who cares about immortality?

“Mr Handsome Jack, everything is ready,” a young woman informs him. Jack doesn’t bother with more than a nod as he heads to the chair in the middle of the room. Scientists begin to apply electrodes on his head, a foul-tasting rubber thing to his mouth to bite on.

“Starting the process in three, two, one…”  
He is glad that he doesn’t remember much of it afterwards. He knows that there is a lot of pain, that he is muffling his screams in the gag and clutching the armrests of the chair. He knows that there are images and sound coming and leaving so fast it makes him slowly go crazy, and every day, he can handle slightly less of it, but he won’t stop.

Four hours later, Jack is drenched in sweat, trembling, and all the scientist leave the room to give him time to recover. When nausea leaves him, he downs a bottle of water and walks out on wobbly legs. “How much?” he asks simply and receives an immediate answer, everything ready for him as always.

“Fifty-three point eighteen percent of memories have been analysed, sir. The program ran into no complications. We estimate the AI to be sixty-five to seventy percent complete.”

The numbers blur together. He is vaguely aware that there are different numbers every day, but if they are raising or falling is a mystery. He stopped caring on the first day when after six hours on the chair they didn’t even get ten percent of his memory analysed.

“Run the prototype,” he says. The first time, it was just a small program that he could chat with. It felt all wrong. Now, it’s more like talking to Angel.

A blue face with a small nervous smile appears on a screen in front of him. Rhys. It looks just like him, and acts almost like him, but it’s not him, not yet.

“Hey, pumpkin,” he forces himself to say. “How are you doing?”

“Hey-y, Jack,” the program answers. “I-I’m fine.” It sounds scared, like every time for the past four days. It was probably fed some memories from the beginning of their relationship, when the PA still didn’t know what to expect. He would be nervous, and Jack would find it cute. Now, it made him want to scream.

“Jack?” the AI asks nervously. “You know, I was wondering… I’m in a computer, right? Am I— Do I exist?” And Jack’s mood is completely down.

“It’s time for another memory wipe. Turn it off,” he tells the scientists, not looking back, ignoring the AI’s panicked cry. It won’t remember this part of its existence once they upload it into the body. And if Jack is Handsome Jack, he will make sure Rhys will never learn.

In his nightmares, he can never undo his mistake of forcing Rhys to go to the meeting with him. Here, they will only have to delete that one memory, upload the AI to the new cloned body, and then Jack can take Rhys home and love the hell out of him for the rest of forever. They can forget all about this. He only has to sit through another month of sessions on the chair to make sure all of his memories about Rhys will be fed to the AI and then get Rhys’ small muscular friend to sit through it too, and then it will be perfect.

He can fix this. He’ll get him back.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me on [Twitter](www.twitter.com/ElfWriting).


End file.
